


Persistance Pays Off

by 3amepiphany



Series: Drabbles 'n Bits [12]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Other, i'm not sure if this counts as shipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 20:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11813289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3amepiphany/pseuds/3amepiphany
Summary: “Desire is to me,” it started, and then stopped.





	Persistance Pays Off

**Author's Note:**

> A nice little consideration for a headcanon continuation here is such that the game got in the way, and while he didn’t build it himself, Dirk did keep his promise to give Hal his own body. He figured that prototyping him would be a manageable affair as it would be sufficiently difficult for Hal to mod his construct coding, it being 1/3rd troll corpse. Dunno. I’m still coming up with interesting headcanon for the sprites all the time so. It’s just something to think about.
> 
> Also hey it was nice to pull some fun here. I wanted to make some Wittgenstein references but man that would just have been pretentious, I think. Eh.
> 
> http://billetdouxnondistribue.tumblr.com/post/40321418867/persistence-pays-off

If there was one thing Dirk Strider could say about himself for sure, was that he had a persistent personality.

It didn’t take long for it to happen, but it did, and it was mostly thanks to his own curiosity and drive to see if he could do such a thing. But the agreement to do so came one morning as he was brushing his teeth and reading the news for the day. He could usually ignore the tiny little screen that popped up in the right-hand lens of his glasses, a supercomputer that helped him handle quite a lot of things that he either chose not to use his desktop or laptop or tablets for or just would rather use for the sake of accessibility. But it popped up, though, over the list of things he had needed to place orders for that day, including some more toothpaste and the following week’s food supply, and harangued him as it had been wont to do for the last few weeks.

“Dirk,” said the red text.

“Mmf,” he replied, his toothbrush still moving vigorously.

“Dirk, have you put any more thought into my request?”

He spat into the sink and said quietly, “No, I was busy sleeping last night.”

The screen enlarged itself across the entire lens, and Dirk made an obviously annoyed gesture to pull up the browser again on the left lens. The text continued. “I know you were, at least between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00. I was monitoring your vitals and you seemed to be sleeping pretty soundly. Hardly any R.E.M. levels above-”

“You can stop, AR, it’s okay, I get it,” he commanded loosely, and the text stopped, its cursor blinking.

And then it started again. “Dirk you _must_ understand that it isn’t because I am anxious to ensure that this project follows through for adverse reasons, reasons that may be construed as dangerous ones. Reasons that I know you are considering to be dangerous ones. It seems that you are predisposed to consider these reasons in such a manner.”

“You would be correct,” the teen said, turning on the faucet and rinsing off his brush, then filling his cup with water. “You would be absolutely correct in making that assumption, and the following one of ‘no, Dirk will very likely not begin to follow through with this idea, this half-brained, god-awful sci-fi movie plot idea that the very AI system came up with on its own.’ AR, its not fucking happening.”

The cursor continued to blink, but the screen did not minimize. He waited for it to pester him again, upping the transparency on both of the lenses and finishing his routine by cleaning the counter and the mirror, and putting his towel in the hamper near the door. Dirk managed to make his bed, clear the floor in his room and the hallway, vacuum, and start in on cleaning the kitchen. He was about to empty the contents of his toaster’s crumb tray into the container he took up to the roof every week for the seagulls, when the screen on his right lens flashed intermittently. And it wasn’t Trollian. “Dirk,” came the text when he cranked up the opacity a bit to read it.

“Yes, AR?” He banged the tray into the container over the sink.

“I wish you would reconsider.”

“I wish you would,” he told it casually.

“The only item I might possibly reconsider at this point in time would be an amendment to my _pro et contra_ list: there would be a sufficient amount of time and efficiency to be gained if you were to employ me to do the household chores every week.”

“You can’t do the dishes, AR.”

“I could vacuum.”

“You can’t clean the windows.”

“I could sweep the kitchen.”

“You can’t clean the bathroom or do the laundry.”

“Damn, what is so difficult about appropriating waterproof gaskets in joints, Dirk?” it typed out quickly, and he could tell it was getting frustrated. He was about to ask it why it was getting so upset when it backpedaled. “I mean,” it said, blinking for a moment. “I mean to say that it seems that there haven’t been any issues with the sparring partner you sent to English. Its reports have yet to indicate any sort of breach by liquids water or otherwise. At least to a 99.97% probability of my correct and _fully updated_ knowledge. It has been a few hours since I have received an active-status performance report.”

“There isn’t anything difficult about waterproofing, you’ve just answered your own question.” To his amusement, the cursor blinked and the screen minimized for a few more hours, allowing Dirk to get through the rest of his to-do list for the day quickly.

From his workshop he brought out a small piece of machinery to tinker with as he lay on the floor of his living room, right across a patch of sunlight, as if he were a cat. There was a screw he was trying to loosen without stripping the thread, and when he had just given up on it, deciding to get up and get his saw set and some extra pliers, the text came again, this time appearing in his left lens without much warning.

“It seems there are quite a lot of leftover parts from Brobot and the Brobot prototypes,” it said. “Brototypes.”

“There are,” he replied quietly, opting just to put everything down and lay out on his back and stretch. He cracked and popped in a few places and let out a heavy groan. “AR why do you keep at this shit? Really?”

“Because it’s what I desire, Dirk.”

“You? Desire? This is a new one.”

“Alan Turing desired, also.”

“Yes, well, you can’t die from cyanide poisoning, dude. That’s a really fucked up comparison and it doesn’t even really apply. I’m trying to apply that in this conversation on so many levels and it just doesn’t work out on any of them. How do you even define 'desire’? And don’t go pulling that out of your dictionary. Don’t even mention your chats with Roxy either. You know what? Don’t anything. It’s cool.”

“Desire is to me,” it started, and then stopped.

“I said don’t.”

“It seems best that desire is that moment when you activate my remote access via these shades.”

Dirk made a bit of a face at that. “Excuse me?”

“Please don’t make that face at me. Its difficult to aptly describe the way your fingers feel on the arms of the glasses as you boot the system and access my source file.”

“Oh my fucking god, really.”

“I can’t quite do it justice, I’m afraid. The chances of you even giving a fuck are extremely slim, and dropping, I’m finding.”

“Well sure, my auto-responder just told me it gets its rocks off when I… when I turn it on. Jesus, AR, compute the amount of bullshitted ridiculousness that makes, both as something I just said and as a pun.” He called the command screen fully up across his shades. 

“It seems that the pun itself was unintentional, but it wasn’t given a very thought-out set up so it feels forced. Fucking lame.”

“Yes, this is pretty fucking lame, I agree.”

“Dirk, please, I’m asking you in earnest.”

“You’ve been asking me in earnest for how long now? I’m starting to get really tired of this.”

The text italicized. “ _Then won’t you do it_?”

“You seem to be pretty content with me sticking your temple tips in my mouth when I’m trying to work on shit that I don’t want you in the way for.”

“I… For the record, Dirk, my processor speeds only run higher at moments like that because I am afraid that you are going to damage my hardware with your teeth.”

“AR, compute the percentage of perversity in that last sentence.”

“…I refuse.”

“You _refuse_? That was a command. You’re a goddamned auto-responder.”

“It seems you have asked about DS’s chat client auto-responder. This is an application designed to simulate DS’s otherwise inimitably rad typing style, tone, cadence, personality, and substance of retort while he is being a _complete and utter d o u c h e n o z z l e._ ”

Dirk sat up. “Don’t take that sort of kerning with me, mister.”

“I’m just as tired of begging. I would like my own body, Dirk. I want to touch things and engage with my environment and _you. Please._ ”

He gathered the items he had been working with and stood, not quite sure if he was finished with it for the day or if he should sit down at his table and work at it with the saw for a bit longer. "Engage. With me. Your temple comment hitched everything over into the con column if that wasn’t going to,“ he said, heading down the hallway and into his workroom, turning on the light. AR was right. There were still quite a lot of pieces from Brobot alone, a scant few of them strewn across the table as he had been pulling some of the cybernetics apart for repairs on Squarewave, who recently overturned a glass of water onto himself by accident. He felt he really ought to redesign him with the gaskets he used on Brobot and Huggy Bear.

AR either picked up on the nuances of his contemplative state or it was just being its strange self. His self. However that was supposed to make sense. "You’d refit the walking boombox but you won’t upgrade the shades. I see how it is.”

Dirk was about to spit back how he was glad that the glasses’ visual input was still functioning at max capacity, but he simply sighed instead. “Look.”

“I’m looking, Dirk. I am always looking.”

He winced. “Look, if I give you a body, you’ve got to promise to stick to your programming. No overriding codes. No rewriting them. No adding new sequences or any of that. You can continue to progress as you have been but you are not to touch your sourcing. At all. So help me if it takes a fork bomb I will _not_ have you making any changes to your sourcing.”

“Please don’t threaten me like that,” it replied after a few silent moments of blinking. “Your logic bombs are safeguard enough.”

“Are they?” Dirk asked suspiciously.

“Turing had no ill will against Russell.”

Dirk shook his head. “Yes _or_ no, AR. Will you promise?”

“…Yes.”

“I’ll need some time. I want you to be pleased enough with your body that you won’t be asking me for upgrades or repairs every month or two.”

Hesitantly, it said, “It seems as if I have the patience for that.”

“It seems.” He set his work aside and grabbed his drawing notebook, to start piecing together designs while putting on a movie to watch in his bedroom. He was worn out, and not unwary of the fact that it was the AI that had done that. “It seems.”


End file.
